INTERVIEWS / REVIEWS

WOR Matt Baker has broken all the showbiz rules in his short but illustrious career so far.

Never work with children and animals, they say. As presenter of BBC TV's Blue Peter, One Man and His Dog, Animal Rescue and Crufts, he has done both.

And in his latest role as Caractacus Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang he combines the two on the same stage!

But last night he displayed his versatility and consummate professionalism with a sublime performance that also revealed what a fine singer, dancer, comedian and even acrobat he is. He has more strings to his bow than Robin Hood; a genuine jack of all trades and master of them all!

Matt is one of the North East's very own, coming from farming stock in Easington, County Durham. He had his first taste of the role, performing Me Ol' Bamboo at the London Palladium, as a challenge on Blue Peter.

He has joined the Chitty bandwagon on its final leg on British soil before it makes its way to the garage for a well-earned rest.

Matt follows in some illustrious theatrical footsteps in the role of the madcap inventor who transforms a clapped-out former Grand Prix-winning car into a magical, floating, flying, winking motor. And he can rub shoulders with the likes of Michael Ball, Gary Wilmot, Jason Donovan and Brian Conley with great pride.

He played Caractacus with sensitivity and verve, managing to outshine a stage full of children and, at one point, dogs. No attempt was made to hide his North East twang - in fact he played on it.

The show has lost nothing since it was last at the Sunderland Empire – if anything, it has become a slicker, well-oiled, polished machine purring from one spectacular song to another. Toot Sweets, Me Ol' Bamboo, The Roses of Success, Posh, Chu-Chi Face and, of course, the title tune were all received with rapturous applause.

It really is the complete package of family entertainment - great dancing, great singing, great story (adapted from the Ian Fleming novel) and fantastic sets. The best journey you'll embark upon for a long while.

And the cast was stronger than the show's previous visit to Sunderland in December 2005. The role of the Child Catcher was made for ballet king Wayne Sleep - his deliciously evil delivery had me quaking in my boots.

Crossroads actor Tony Adams gave a controlled, assured performance as Grandpa Potts, while Rachel Stanley's Truly Scrumptious was indeed truly scrumptious.

The various double acts fizzed with energy - Nigel Garton and Jaymz Denning were hilarious as the two spies from Vulgaria, the land whose ruler has banished children and vowed to steal Chitty. It was a real pantomime act, complete with one-liners, double entendres, dodgy accents and daft costumes.

Edward Peel and Kim Ismay were equally impressive as Baron and Baroness Bomburst, their comic timing exquisite.

But perhaps the greatest praise should be reserved for the two children, 11-year-old Rebecca Chapman, from Sunderland, and Eliott Allinson, nine, from Richmond, who were faultless as the Potts twins Jemima and Jeremy.

It will be a sad day when this spectacular car is finally driven off the road and into retirement, so I would urge you to race along to the Empire and take a spin.

TV presenter Matt Baker, 30, was the face of Blue Peter for seven years. During his stint, he completed many stunts, often accompanied by his border collie Meg. Since leaving, Matt has presented Crufts, One Man And His Dog and Animal Rescue. He's just finished a stint in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and can be seen in the PDSA's fundraising calendar, on sale this week.

Is your pet, former Blue Peter dog Meg, missing the limelight?
Not at all. She's enjoying her retirement on the farm now, she works the sheep most days. Wherever we used to go with the programme, people would come up to her, so she's enjoying a quiet time now.

Did you have to break the news that Smudge, the Blue Peter cat, had been mown down by a reckless driver?
No, fortunately Simon [Thomas] was the one who had to tell the viewers the cat had been run over. It was a bit of a shock. Some people get very attached to the pets. You wouldn't believe the amount of fan mail the animals get. It was awful, poor thing.

What were the highlights of your time on the show?
I travelled all over the world and met some amazing people. I slept in jungles and lived with a nomadic family in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. I set a world hang-gliding record, which was pretty cool. It was the highest altitude towed launch. They towed me up behind a light aircraft and I flew down. It was amazing.

You do lots of dog-related TV shows. Are you stuck in a rut?
I've just done Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which was completely non-dog-related, and I'll be commentating at the Olympics. I do One Man And His Dog and Crufts but it's just part of what I do.

What's been your worst moment on TV?
On Blue Peter, we had Vanessa Mae playing her violin in the studio and the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards were supposed to march into the studio through the big outside doors, and they'd all play the rest of the song together. Someone had shut the doors and me and Simon couldn't open them to let the guards in. Everyone who was standing around came over to help us pull them open them but we couldn't move them; we just got them slightly ajar. The soldiers pushed their way through just as the song ended. It's fun, though, when things go wrong. Otherwise what's the point of doing live TV?

I enjoyed the dedication gymnastics required. People hassled me but where are they now?

What was it like being in a comedy disco-dancing troupe?
Fun. We were called Disco Inferno. I did it while I was at college. I had to juggle with wooden clubs that were painted to look like spirits bottles and I did a few backflips. We toured nightclubs in Barnsley, Cleethorpes and Middlesbrough, performing in front of 2,500 people a night. It was brilliant.

You were a young gymnastics champion. Did the other children make fun of you?
They gave me stick but I was British champion and they were just hanging around on street corners. Without the gymnastics, I wouldn't have been able to do the physically demanding stuff on Blue Peter, like the paratrooper training courses. I approached gymnastics as a sportsman, I enjoyed the dedication it required. People hassled me but where are they now?

Have you tried tracking them down on Facebook?
No. I'm not on Facebook.

What is your dream presenting job?
It's tricky. I did so many amazing things on Blue Peter. That was the ultimate job in a lot of ways. If we arrived at work and said we fancied flying a jet that week, they'd arrange it. I trained as an actor, so I'd like to do more of that. I'd like to do serious roles in the theatre. We'll see.

What's the worst job you've ever had?
I did a milk round when I was 14. I had to get up at 4am but I thought it was brilliant because I'd get £5 a morning. I thought I was loaded.

What's the weirdest thing you've put in your mouth?
I ate a tarantula in Cambodia. You pull off all the stingy bits and deep fry them. They're a cross between prawn and chicken. There's not much meat on them.

For all the armies of faces that have marched across teatime screens down the decades, very few have ever possessed the secret of contemporary children's telly.

Sure, many hundreds have embodied everything that, by whatever measure of success is in fashion at the time, could be said to represent new, exciting and entertaining TV. Most of them did it by simply not trying to be children's presenters, or drifting into children's television by accident, or labouring long to give the appearance of not resenting drifting into children's television by accident.

Most of them used to be a good few dozen years older than the people they were supposed to be entertaining to boot. Age, experience and a rumpled jacket were once the touchstones of the crystal bucket as well as the blackboard.

But all along, up to and including the present day, only a handful have really ever succeeded, not by doing, but by simply being. Who have impressed not by seeking to be impressionable, or even by being impressive, but by appearing not to try. Who somehow match up perfectly with those unspoken assumptions somewhere in the back of your mind that dictate what you should want to see from a children's presenter. And who don't always come sporting rumpled jackets.

Johnny Ball was one. So was Fred Harris. And it's fair to say that, during his time on Blue Peter, Matt Baker has been another of those people who seemed to possess the secret of contemporary children's telly. What's more, he's just shown himself to know precisely the right moment to take his leave and pack up his magic for another time and place.

Today's edition, a shameless clip show subtitled "Matt Baker: Mover and Shaker", offered by way of a parting salute a montage of every trick in the conjuror's book. We saw the man twirling and hollering his way through enough flannel to fill several wardrobes - the same ones, presumably, which Matt had spent seven years emptying in order to arm himself with a canon of costume changes, a plethora of powdered wigs and a fair legion of false moustaches.

We saw him toe-tapping his way around the world and back again. We saw him turn his tonsils to Presley, old-time music hall, Hollywood song and dance, and Billy Joel. A downright spectacular version of Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money) was followed by a frankly disturbing performance of I Enjoy Being a Girl, which in turn gave way to a wonderful rendition of New York New York (So Good They Named it Twice) with Matt shimmying and shrugging his way around the strangely oblivious titular city streets.

Heaven knows on what premise most of these glossy production numbers were originally staged. Most times there probably wasn't one. But that in itself stands as testament to the rude health of Blue Peter's recent history, where no longer have things needed to be universally weighed down by the urgency of requiring a purpose or proving a point. The worthy has mixed with the whimsical, neither grating against the other thanks to ability of its ranks of presenters to switch and judge contrasting moods perfectly.

Matt was always the undisputed master of such a technique, and while this particular selection of highlights was only one slice of the man's endeavours aboard the good ship, here was proof enough of his instinctive feel for all the tenets of textbook children's TV: the lightness of touch, the self-deprecation, the elder brother-style banter, the passion for silliness, the respect for the sublime.

There hasn't really been a Blue Peter presenter like him - ever. Those who went before who encapsulated some of the same spirit, the same breathless enthusiasm, the same idea of living life for its own sake, were all too old to ever appear anything more than zany uncles with a tendency to never know when to shut up. Or that's how it felt at the time. For like policemen, Blue Peter presenters never used to seem as young as they do now. But unlike policeman, this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

If there's one thing above all else worth garlanding as a tribute to Matt's time on the show, it is the way he helped it to lose its fusty, mildly patronising air, of the kind produced every time your unwelcome snobby cousin turned up in your bedroom when the relatives stopped by for Sunday tea. And this, in turn, has seeped out through the rest of the schedules, arguably helping to make Children's BBC, since the turn of the century, better than it has ever been.

The fact that practitioners of today's children's telly hail mostly from the generation who were watching the stuff as kids 10 years or so ago is no longer something that can be mustered by way of abuse. Nowadays it's a mark of success. It will be impossible for anyone to follow Matt Baker onto Blue Peter and match his dazzling tenure, but at least his legacy survives him within the fabric of the show itself and the ever-colourful, ever-cheerful world through which he moved. Or rather, hoofed.